An interesting thing happened in some Never Trump circles after the Democratic primary debates ended last Thursday night. While it won’t change the calculous of those we are about to discuss, it at least has them finally admitting the imperfect reality that drove the decision of many Trump voters in 2016.

To preface, we need to establish exactly what group of Never Trump figures we are talking about here.

The movement made a dramatic split in 2018 before the mid-term elections. While some Never Trump members realized that supporting Democrats to flex their opposition to Trump was a foolhardy move that did nothing to move the ball forward, there was a not insignificant contingent of the Never Trump movement that outright endorsed electing Democrats across the board, not just in 2018, but preemptively for 2020 also.

It just so happened that many of these Never Trump figures also had the biggest platforms. People like David Brooks, Bret Stephens, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Ann Navarro, and Jennifer Rubin all came out in support of electing Democrats.

That’s the group being discussed in this article and the distinction is important. While I may disagree with the other faction of Never Trump’s reasoning for abstaining, I can at least understand their position. What I can’t do is respect those supporting Democrats simply to go after Donald Trump, something no real conservative could ever actually justify with any appeal to principle. For the purpose of this article, I’m addressing the latter group, many of whom I named above.

With that out of the way, I want to focus on two articles published this week by Never Trump leaders David Brooks and Bret Stephens, both writers for The New York Times.

If the Democratic moderates take on progressives they get squashed by the passionate intensity of the left. If they don’t, the party moves so far left that it can’t win in the fall. https://t.co/vlVdF79Vd3

In a pathetic plea to a party that’s been objectively catering to the far-left for well over a decade, David Brooks begs Democrats to not continue being leftwing because it may drive him away.

I’ll also note that while Brooks makes claims of morality in his piece, he’s got a story much akin to insufferable moralist Charlie Sykes. Namely, he cheated on his wife and then married his researcher. Many of these people are not the best voices to make the moral case against Trump.

Before we get into the dynamics of all this though, here’s Stephens’ similar piece to compare.

Democrats can't win if they continue to make millions of Americans feel like strangers in their own land. My column on the debates in @nytopinion: https://t.co/8Nc7WLrgVU

What exactly did any of these Never Trump voices think the Democrat party was? Are they really claiming any of this is new?

Although they’ll never admit it, they are actually articulating the issue that led millions of otherwise Trump skeptics in 2016 to go ahead and vote for him. When given a choice between generally conservative policy, past affairs, and Twitter bluster vs. voting for Hillary Clinton and a radically progressive Democrat party, many made the former choice.

For that they got savaged by people like David Brooks and Bret Stephens as being unprincipled sell-outs, bad Christians, and hypocrites. All for deciding that making a choice was preferable to not making a choice.

Suddenly, these people are discovering that the Democrat party isn’t actually a viable alternative after pushing to vote for it in 2018 and 2020 until now? Come on.

It's pretty funny watching moderate Republicans catch up to where a lot of fed up and reluctant Trump voters were 3 years ago.

The best part is the part where they act like they discovered this and it's a brand new problem. https://t.co/9srwJP9xTV

Given that, why would Brooks or Stephens ever think that going to the Democrat party was a viable option? I don’t know, but Trump makes people do weird things.

Here’s my position. If you want to not vote for Trump, I’m not going to berate you for that. In the face of what we saw up on that stage Wednesday and Thursday, I can’t agree with that decision, but there’s daylight between not voting for Trump and outright pushing the radicalism of the Democrat party just to spite Trump.

In the case of Never Trumpers who endorsed Democrats and asked Americans to vote for them despite those of us who said that’s a ridiculous notion, they don’t get to now pretend the radicalism of the left is a new, unforeseen thing bursting on the scene in mid-2019.

That reality has been apparent to many of us for years and it was the reason many decided voting for Trump made the most sense 2016.

Had those specific Never Trump figures handled the matter differently instead of resorting to attacking the personal morality of Republican voters, I could perhaps muster some sympathy for the position Brooks, Stephens, and others now find themselves in.

But they didn’t and I don’t. So enjoy your new friends.

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Don’t get David Brooks wrong. He’s not celebrating the fact that Donald Trump is “good for business” in this interview yesterday with CBN’s David Brody. In fact, he’s worried that the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media has “made Donald Trump our business model.” This is a lament, not an end-zone dance.

And while Brooks says his NYT editors tell him to write what he wants, Brooks knows what pays the bills, baby:

In a one-on-one interview with CBN’s Chief Political Analyst David Brody, New York Times Columnist David Brooks admits that when it comes to the media industry, President Trump has been “good for business.”

Brooks believes Trump has changed the media model for business practices and laments that as a failure. Yet, in a candid assessment of his own tendencies as a columnist, he tells CBN News, “How do I drive traffic? I write something nasty about Donald Trump.”

Let’s face it — online news sources write with their audiences’ interests in mind anyway. No one sets out to write a column, an article, or a blog post that will get ignored by everyone. Just as subscriptions and sales are the coin of the realm to advertisers in print media and the Nielsen and Arbitron ratings are in broadcast media, page views and clicks are in online ad sales. It pays the bills. Brooks could write all year long about agricultural policy — an important if unexciting topic — but he’d shortly find himself writing to his friends about it while someone else tackled the Trump beat.

Brooks is lamenting something more specific, however — the pressure to pander to readers. Brooks doesn’t just say that he writes about Trump, but that he knows he can drive traffic if he writes “something nasty” about him. It’s an admission, tacit at least, that the New York Times readership isn’t interested in fair and balanced coverage of the administration, and that therefore skews the coverage and commentary the outlet produces. That might only be news to the readers of the NYT, of course, but it’s still a surprising admission from Brooks. In another context of the same interview, Brooks also laments the political tribalization of evangelical Christians, but Brooks might consider whether media outlets have gone through the same process — especially in the Trump era, but starting long long long before that.

Be sure to pay attention to Brooks’ thoughtful take on the evolution of evangelical Christians, and his intriguing notion that it might be a poll-driven phenomenon. His existential question about the news media echoes in a way Trump’s repeated claims that the NYT will go bankrupt after he leaves office. “What’s it look like after Trump?”

That recognition appears to play a role in the way Brooks makes his argument. He starts off his column with a heaping serving of poxes on both houses, especially Trump. Brooks writes that Trump “never understood checks and balances,” or “anything that stands in the way of his spoiled-boy will.” With that box checked in paragraph two, Brooks proceeds to dole out blame to both parties for the corrosion of checks and balances all the way down to paragraph five, where Brooks finally gets to the point:

Republicans have crossed this line in the past, and Democrats crossed it this week, undermining the way the system of oversight is supposed to work. How do we know this? Because of what Democrats are declaring a constitutional crisis over — the redaction levels of the Mueller report. Of all the contemptible things the Trump administration has done, this is probably the least contemptible.

Sure, William Barr distorted the report in his initial summary, but he also released a report that was extremely damning about his own president. In addition, Barr has made 99.9 percent of Volume II of the Mueller report, which is focused on obstruction, available to top Democrats, as noted in a letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd.

Brooks then covers in brief some of the arguments made yesterday by Jonathan Turley at more length. He notes that the contempt charge won’t actually solve anything, using Eric Holder as an example while also pointing out that Republicans gave Holder well over a year to produce Operation Fast and Furious documentation before triggering the contempt charge. Brooks then gets to his main point, which is that Democrats’ politicization of checks and balances will destroy them — and play right into Trump’s hands:

This constitutional crisis is just for show. Partly the Democrats want the show because it just feels good to bash the administration. “This has had a cathartic effect on the Democrats because we have finally been able to find a way to fight back at the obstructionism,” Representative Jamie Raskin told my Times colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

Partly they are trying to appease the wing of the party that is calling for impeachment right away. The party leaders generally opposed impeachment for sensible reasons. It would be impossible to win a conviction in the Senate without some Republican cooperation and overwhelming popular support — which doesn’t exist. It’s much better for the Democrats if they focus media attention on their presidential candidates. A Trump vs. Nadler media war is exactly what Trump wants.

The problem with any policy of appeasement is that it rarely appeases; it only emboldens. And that’s what’s happening. You can feel the atmosphere in the Democratic Party changing, getting more passionate, getting more caught up in the back-and-forth combat with Trump, getting more whipped up into impeachment furor.

Both sides are playing a dangerous game, but Democrats have much more to lose in it. Public opinion isn’t shifting in their favor — it’s shifting away from them, in part because voters have little interest or investment into Beltway food fights. That’s especially true when the issue is as esoteric as redactions in a report that’s otherwise fully published and its conclusions clearly assessable. If Congress goes nuts over 2% redactions to protect grand-jury information in a report that let Trump off the hook anyway, that won’t erode trust in the presidency as much as it will erode trust in Congress, although it will have a corrosive effect on both in the long run.

As for Brooks’ common-sense take being “an unpopular view at the Times,” well … that’s no surprise either.

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